Bangalore: Micro Focus, a company that provides software and consultancy services to its clients looking to update their legacy systems to more modern platforms, had its executives David Taylor (President APAC, Japan) and Nitin Dang (Country General manager of Micro Focus) share their insights with SiliconIndia about COBOL-run systems, the dilemmas of CIOs, enterprise IT and where it’s headed.

When do you call a project a failure?

A project failing has more to do with the application development cycle. More or less, we come to know that something has gone wrong while we test. And as we are all aware, in most projects, testing comes to the scene at the far end of the project, and when the time lines are more of importance.

But if we get to know during the testing phase that things that actually haven’t gone right, we go back and start all over again, and make corrections--till now it’s not a failure.The project fails when it exceeds the budget we started on or exceeds the timeline allotted for the project.

Microfocus provides tools for project failures; can you give us a brief on that?

Microfocus has toolsets where we gather requirements, right from stage one i.e from requirement gathering.  We also enable change management so changes made across these phases or lifecycle of that application, go through and through and the project is completed well within time as per the requirements which were originally decided.

So you provide the tools and take utmost care from the start till the project ends until there is no chance of project failure, right?

Yes. From the selection stage dragging to the life cycle, and when you come to testing there’s functional testing, performance testing and you need to managing the entire cycle-- so that’s exactly what we do.

What steps do you think CIOs should take to modernize their IT infrastructure in the present scenario of cuts in the IT budgets?

That’s a good question.The major chunk of applications (which probably runs most sectors), run on their own legacy systems. But since people need a lot of IT infrastructure to run the applications on main frame systems, they end up spending a lot on their infrastructure.

So we see a lot of CIOs wondering how to retain the quality the performance of those applications in which they’ve have invested, and as a business we focus on moving those legacy systems off from those high end so called main frames, and bringing them down to a lower rung (unix or linux).

What if I don’t want to migrate off the mainframes?

Well once you’ve got the development done off the mainframe, you need to test it on other systems and put it back on the mainframe to check it again so you can see if everything is working fine.

Can you give us a walk through the (enterprise) IT space globally and India-specific?

The enterprise IT space globally, is very big, but from financial to government-sector and airline to communication sectors-- large enterprises use mainframe computers with various applications supporting those businesses. Surrounded by that are other mainstream networks and distributed systems and then above all that of course is the next wave of advancement coming in—the predominance of mobile devices being used to access those systems.

Another factor adding to this scenario is the obviously sheer volume of services provided to customers in the government and private sectors from the web—we’ve seen an enormous amount of access coming in by that medium.And then again mobile devices are starting to pay a significant role there. What we tend to find in our business is about 70 percent of the cost of the mainframe environment, (for example) is basically devoted to running and maintaining existing systems. And there’s very little money left over for innovation, so we try and reduce costs for those looking to reduce them– well you can imagine that the net is getting more and more complex, and more and more expensive to run, an organization looking at a variety of different ways to try and lower their cost of running those systems.

What do you propose to companies trying to reduce their IT spends?

Our design provides two factors which fundamentally result in lower costs-- Firstly we design to dramatically improve productivity of the people by being able to create a development environment on a workstation which ultimately will run up on a mainframe or any other platform.

But how can enabling myself to be able to provide modern development environments, for classic or traditional old COBOL systems (for example) important from a cost-point of view?

Productivity is a game, and can mean very real dollar-savings. Currently, if you reduce the amount of people you employ, most organizations take the improvement in productivity and use that to increase their through-put so that they can get more with the same resource but at the same save up resource so they can focus more on innovation.

So what’s the key behind modernizing infrastructure while retaining and reusing existing infrastructure?

Actually the key to what we do is more than just the infrastructure—it’s the application itself: that’s the key to what we do. It’s modernization of the application, not the infrastructure. We can take an application running on one platform and make it run on another platform very easily. That’s what makes what we do a business.

All the testing technologies we have are there to support and to ensure that what we’ve moved high-quality applications that will perform perfectly. By moving that application to a modern environment, it can run on any platform, or environment where it’s much easier for it to interact and to talk to other systems; or to modify and add to other front-end zones; like to make it run in the cloud (for example), or to have a mobile device interact with it.

That’s the modernization element. So you could have a brand-new front end on those ground-old mainframe screens so that user-interface is intuitive or web-based and so on, and again making the users of those systems more productive. That’s the value we bring to our customers.

So combining everything, I just wanted to know a figure, as a percentage—how many CIOs are modernizing and upgrading in India alone? A rough percentage, a number?

I think nearly every CIO is talking to their people with regard to what’s possible for them to do, in terms of the amounts that are actually budgeted this current year.I must admit that I don’t have an actual figure to give that. I can only suggest that the people we’re talking to are certainly obviously looking at that, and we’re talking to most of the larger IT organizations in the country.

From the global perspective, there’s a significant volume of businesses being generated through the likes of TCS, Infosys, HCL, and so on, all who use their tools for generation an enormous amount of revenue from companies globally who are looking for ways to modernize and improve their applications.

How can CIOs maintain a balance between reusing their legacy technologies and upgrading to newer technologies? With low budget and modernization coming in, there’s a need of using the legacy technologies as well.

Whenever the CIO faces a challenge wherein he’s got an older legacy application which probably has been run on for a number of years, his company’s IT invested in it, and they’ve been doing a particular function using that legacy application for so many years. They might have even rebuilt that application as per their need.

The choice that a CIO has with respect to modernization is probably one of “can we re-write the entire application?”

But if we re-write, it’s common for a big application to take a couple of years (or more) to get it all re-written and come to the level it’s running at currently today.

The other choice he has is to go and pickup a standardized package like ARP or SAP (or the likes of those) and get them customized as per his needs. But it’s a commonly known fact that even these things take over more than a year to implement and get running, and what you actually lose out on is the competitive edge in the market.

The third option is to do nothing. Just let it run, and let everybody man it the way it is.The fourth option is the one we focus on—one that asks the question “why not just move the application off the cumbersome legacy systems that’s running up the mainframes, and bring it to a lower-cost running environment?” Well in doing so, we free up all that space, bring it down to a distributed platform like Unix or Linux, or a Windows.

Could you give us a mention of your clients who consulted you during crisis of project failures or when having to deal with an upgrade?

Actually we operate via the partner model, so most of our clients use our technology to support their end customers who are either in India or across the globe. Our clients include TCS, Wipro, Infosys, and we help them at any juncture of their application.

Who do you think among your Indian clients have best used the infrastructure you’ve provided?

Global Software Industries use our technologies to the maximum in way they’re able to use it; because what it does is to help them reduce their costs and turnover time. One good example would be TCS with regard to their bank-application; they’ve built their bank application on our platform, so every time that application is installed and run, it runs under Microfocus.

And one of the largest organizations globally among banks using that technology is the State Bank of India. They’ve been one of our single largest customers with a huge installation, and their system runs and performs extremely well. Before buying our application the main choice they had was to mainframe their applications.

What trend do you see in the future that you can predict?

What we see in the short and medium term is that more and more systems need to be able to support mobile device application.

An example would be the Common Wealth Bank of Australia, which released an application called “ka-ching” which basically, if four people dine in a restaurant, and they want to share the cost of the food, one person pays for it, and the other three go on to their Apple iPhone, and go to their “ka-ching” application and send in their share of the bill to the person who makes the payment. Now if you think about it, it’s a very, very simple application from the front end, very usable, but at the back end, it’s still integrated with the mainframe core banking systems because it has to extract the money from each of the accounts.So we’ve seen an enormous amount of evolution coming in to how people will interact with the people they do business with, as well as governments via mobile devices. We see driving a lot of activity from the development and testing perspective since we need to run performance tests for all those mobile devices since they interact differently.